Israel and the Diaspora

The Israeli parliament, the Knesset, may soon offer a legal definition of who is actually Jew, giving the country's Orthodox rabbis control of all conversions in Israel. Alana Newhouse notes that "if passed, this legislation would place authority over all Jewish births, marriages and deaths—and, through them, the fundamental questions of Jewish identity—in the hands of a small group of ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, rabbis." She notes that the bill could cause a rift between Israeli Jews an those in the diaspora.